NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Dp is a program that parses dates according to the ARPA Internet
standard. It also understands many non-standard formats, such as those
produced by TOPS-20 sites and some UNIX sites using ctime(3). It is
useful for seeing how nmh will interpret a date.
The dp program treats each argument as a single date, and prints the
date out in the official 822-format. Hence, it is usually best to
enclose each argument in double-quotes for the shell.
To override the output format used by dp, the -formatstring or -formatfile switches are used. This permits individual fields of the address
to be extracted with ease. The string is simply a format string and
the file is simply a format file. See mh-format(5) for the details.
Here is the default format string used by dp:
%<(nodate{text})error: %{text}%|%(putstr(pretty{text}))%>
which says that if an error was detected, print the error, a `:', and
the date in error. Otherwise, output the 822-proper format of the
date.